Take control of unmanaged products with new enhancements to Automatic Product Discovery

[#1]

Hi everyone, as you may know, Automatic Product Discovery (APD) has been a longstanding Atlassian Access feature that helps organization admins gain visibility into user-created products, a common form of shadow IT. The feature discovers and alerts admins of what Atlassian cloud products their managed users created, the date of creation, the last active date of use, how many total users have joined those products, and perhaps most importantly, which users currently administer those products.

The initial insights of APD were significant, providing admins with more visibility into user activity, but shadow IT continues to be a challenge. In fact, 59% of IT professionals said their SaaS tech sprawl was increasingly challenging to manage and more than 50% of surveyed organizations reported that employees had set up applications and systems without IT’s knowledge or approval.

Org admins told us that they wanted the ability not just to access insights within APD, but to take action on them, given that shadow IT can introduce security and compliance risks, cost implications, and operational complexity. With this new enhancement, organization admins can now take control of previously unmanaged products.

How it works:

You can navigate to the ‘Security’ tab within admin.atlassian.com, and go to the 'Discovered products' section on the left-hand side.

You will then see a list of discovered products within your organization…and now, can join these products and assume control.

This feature enhancement is now live and can be used by org admins with an Atlassian Access subscription. We appreciate any feedback and questions about APD, thank you in advance for your thoughtful participation.

The Admin Experience Team

[Hana Kučerová]

Very welcomed functionality!

[CEDRIC DEVAUX]

Hi Vikky,

It's a very good improvement ! 

[David Meredith]

This is really useful for dealing with discovered products that users have spun up and finally gives us an easy way to do something about it rather than guiding the user that created the product!

I would still rather the preventative measures that are configurable on Enterprise plans so that we didn't need to do this action at all.

Ideally the ability to Prevent users from signing up for products would be made available to all Atlassian Access users rather than just Enterprise. This is requested on CLOUD-10325.

[Hana Kučerová]

I agree with @David Meredith , that would be better. Still it is great it is finaly possible to do something about it.

[Kalin U]

Is Trello part of the auto discovered products? Often, users (managed accounts with the only role of JSM customers) will unknowingly create a new Trello workspace and will start being counted as billable for Access.

[Rudy Holtkamp]

Yeah it would be really nice to be able to prevent managed users to create Trello boards.

[flavia.vespermann]

Hello there. Does this feature allow ORG ADMINS to take control of external sites created e shared by the users? Or it is still necessary to contact them and request deletion or any other action needed? 

[Joe.Noel]

It is still extremely cumbersome (with long wind-down wait times built in) to close out external sites created by users due to Atlassian's aggressive marketing 'features.'

This is little more than a stopgap measure. The solution is to make prevention of external sites a Standard+ feature for Atlassian apps--not an Enterprise-gated feature. It *is* a security risk and it's wild to me that users are still raising this as an issue literally years later...

[Michael McLennan]

Echoing Joe's comments above. The timeframe to close down sites is 30+ days, and the process to manually check for new sites each week/month still creates hours of additional admin work. Given this is a security feature, would it not be better to include this in Guard instead of Enterprise? I'm speaking on the behalf of recurring customer feedback

[Leonardo Bertolo]

Active prevention of users creating new sites should be considered a core security feature.

I cannot avoid being redundant, as many people here is saying the same: include that feature in the Standard tier.

Yet, Atlassian seems to be looking in the other way. Or, sadly, only in their bank accounts.